


Impossible Measurements

by nimmieamee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 17:06:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2277807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Steve, I love you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossible Measurements

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Невозможные измерения](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12033081) by [Taytao](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taytao/pseuds/Taytao)



> Written for the tumblr first lines meme. I was given the first line. The rest is me.

"Steve, pal," said Bucky, and every cell in his body swelled with the impossibility of this statement, "I love you."

Steve stared at him. In the front of the car, an agent masqueraded as a cabbie. The touchscreen before them was playing a news report on a loop. Daytime anchors were profiling a comedian.

“A dream, they call it!” said the comedian. “I call it an impossibility. See, they call it a dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Laughter rang out from the touchscreen, like inside there might be real people. But the touchscreen has no people in it. It was just wires on old cab leather. Steve punched the off button. The program stammered to a halt.

They continued down the FDR drive. To their left, the East River was unrecognizable; there were few boats, there were almost no piers left. No shipments coming in, no fishermen sitting along the edge. It had been scrubbed clean of any traces of usefulness. The city didn't need it anymore.

Because Steve wouldn't say anything, Bucky stared at the East Side instead. He saw the ugly brick buildings of Stuyvesant town, crosses etched into the cityscape, give way to the uglier landscape of midtown: the United Nations School, the midtown skyport, a network of old hospitals, antiquated and once-glamorous apartment buildings, empty pits for new construction. Ancient and futuristic all together, like the city had decided to measure itself properly for the first time in years, and was now throwing off old clothes for new.

The end result was undeniably ugly.

“Do you know what that means?” Steve finally said.

“No,” Bucky said. He looked at his arm and felt that it was ugly, and he could feel the weight of the weapons in his pocket, the ones Steve didn’t know he had, and the ones he knew about and hadn’t let the agents try to take away. They all felt ugly as well. Ugly and unpromising. To believe and love any of this, any of the things that made him up, had to be like dreaming. You had to be asleep.

He said, “But you asked. I said that once. I remembered. I said that.”

-

“Steve, pal,” Bucky said. “I love you.”

In response Steve looked to his left, where a heavyset man in a drape suit was polishing off shad roe. Then to his right: a family of five was blocking his exit, enjoying a plate of clams. Then over his shoulder at the solid wall. Steve looked back down at his plate of meager fish and peas. He picked it up. He neatly balanced his fork on the plate. Then, without preamble, he slid under the table.

No one at Baldini’s remarked on it: not the heavyset man, not the family of five, not the other customers, not Baldini in the back straightening up all those stupid boats in bottles on the shelf, not Mrs. Baldini at the register. Loretta Baldini, black like her mother and with the hawkish nose of her father, caught Bucky’s shocked face and exploded into laughter, then went back to writing the night’s specials on the seven-foot mirror near the door.

“Your dishwasher just went under the table,” Bucky complained to Baldini.

“Is he coming up to start work in ten minutes?” Baldini asked the table.

And the table said, “Yes.”

So Bucky had no choice: he slid under the table, too. Steve fit perfectly even sandwiched between the wide legs and huge knees on his left, and the shifting family of limbs on his right. But Bucky was broad enough now, at fourteen, that it was a tight fit on his side. He hit his head on the bottom of the table and one of the family of five complained and rapped her fork right above his left ear.

Rude.

Steve was eating his fish. He looked annoyed to have his escape plan so neatly thwarted.

“Did you hear me, Steve?” Bucky said. “I love you. But you’re not our guy this time, that’s all.”

Steve collected his peas into a mound, then mashed them very coolly, very deliberately. Someone above him dropped a napkin full of chewed-up fish bones near his knee. He didn’t seem to notice or care.

“It’s for the Atlantic Monthly prize,” Bucky said desperately. “And they wanna see big guys. You’re alright in a crunch—“

Steve snorted.

“—but this is about strength! There’s gonna be wrestling matches, and runs and hurdles—and we’re not talking a forty-man roster here, Steve. Mr. Capetorio says they only  _want_  ten guys per school! I’ve gotta have Walt and Junior, you know that. And Donnie Chavez, and Ralph. And—“

Steve finished mashing his peas. He didn’t eat them. He glared at them, then lifted up the whole plate and slid it back onto the table, then pulled himself back onto the bench, turning around and tuning Bucky out completely, so that all Bucky saw was the skinny line of Steve’s back in his undershirt, the curve of his hip as his belt slid down, and finally just his bony ankles and calves.

Now he was just being childish.

Bucky pulled himself back up. Steve was feeding his mashed peas to the youngest in the family of five. Her parents didn’t seem to mind; they smiled and willingly allowed themselves to become involved in this obvious plot to ignore Bucky completely.

“Do you wanna hit me?” Bucky asked. “Fight about it?”

That seemed like the kind of thing Steve usually did. That seemed right for Steve.

“No,” Steve said, after a minute. He finished feeding the baby. He put his fork down. He looked Bucky straight in the face – Steve always looked straight; he seemed always to be daring himself not to back away from people – and said, “Forget it, Buck.”

He was a pipsqueak. Customers thought Baldini was crazy, employing a ten year old, because that was Steve; at thirteen, Steve looked ten. He had no girth or power or stamina to speak of, he couldn’t run, his legs were no good, his wrists were weak, and he was always catching something. It would be impossible to present him to the judges of the Atlantic Monthly competition.

Steve. An athletic champion of the Brooklyn public school system. What a joke. He’d be flattened in a minute anyway, and that was an ugly thought. So Bucky was helping him out by keeping him out, really.

“Pal, you know I love you,” he tried again.

“Thanks,” Steve said flatly.

-

“Steve,” Bucky would say. “ _I_ love you.”

Steve picked his way through the rubble. One wall was still standing. It had once had some kind of monument painted on it. Neither of them would’ve known what the monument had been about if a passerby – cheerful, in the way these people usually were after air raids – hadn’t helpfully pointed out the half-demolished sign.

Here died Al Bowlly.

Bucky had no attachments to Al Bowlly. He, unlike Steve, had always owned a phonograph (well, shared one with his siblings, at any rate). But he couldn’t recall ever playing Al Bowlly on it. He had no memory of what Bowlly’s voice sounded like. He couldn’t say definitively that Bowlly’s St. James Infirmary was any better than Shaw’s, or Calloway’s, or Jack Teagarden’s. Al Bowlly seemed to be a British invention – except that Sarah Rogers had apparently loved him.

“She always said he sounded like a dream,” Steve said, crouching to look at the remains of an adjacent wall. He had to crouch quite a bit. He was now very tall.

“Sure,” Bucky said, and stood awkwardly behind him, and felt suddenly like he had to scratch something, but he couldn’t say what, and possibly it was not a real something but  _him_ , something inside him. Something he wanted to yank out. The memory of a song, maybe. He didn’t have it on hand. Now when he heard music it came to him filtered through irritation; he was always irritated. He woke nights with his ears pounding, and sometimes he found himself sitting a ways off with Dernier and Jones, and they would play music when they could and had the means, and it always seemed to suit them. Their faces would lighten. They’d start to talk in agreeable voices.

Anne Shelton, Bing Crosby, Vera Lynn.

Bucky always found he had no interest. He’d loved music and dancing – the Barnes phonograph had not been for playing music, but for  _dancing_  — but now he couldn’t see the point to it.

Steve began to hum, off key. Midnight, The Stars, And You.

A passing Londoner picked it up. She seemed cheerful. She broke off only to say, “Lovely day, isn’t it? I just love air raids,” and then walked away, leaving Steve laughing.

Well. He would be in a good mood.

“Thinking of Agent Carter?” Bucky guessed.

And Steve looked up at him – it was still Steve, in that shrug, in the blush, in the way he blinked a little too rapidly – and only grinned.

“Seemed—“ he said, after a minute, “—seemed impossible to think—“

“Yeah, well, when you look like you do now a lot of things are possible,” Bucky told him.

Steve stared at him. Not taken aback. Not offended. Just cool and straight about it, like Steve always was. Like this new Steve, the dream Steve, was just a few layers away from the real Steve. He was. He  _was_. This was Steve: the little guy from Brooklyn.

Bucky wanted to pinch Steve sometimes, to see if that would wake Steve up and bring the old Steve back. Or pinch himself. He didn’t know.

“Didn’t think anybody could even pretend to like me,” Steve said. “Let alone a beautiful somebody.” He said this like he was laughing about it, a little. He was finally in a position to laugh about it.

“Lots of girls liked you,” Bucky said. “And I liked you. Loved you, even. Steve,  _I_  love you.”

Steve laughed and stood up. He walked carefully, powerfully. He was cheerful, perfect, like the whole new city. A happy city, a city after an air raid. He didn’t seem to notice he was humming.

Did he love this Steve? This Steve was something different. The old Steve with new clothes on, maybe. Sure.

It felt, sometimes, like Bucky could only process him through a haze of irritation. But this was Steve. This was all the Steve he had now. This one.

Bucky pinched himself absentmindedly.

-

“But Steve,” Bucky said, “I  _love_  you.”

They sat in the car. It was a new car – a Stutz, owned by the Buchanan cousins. Not the old car, the one Bucky’s pop had. The old car was alright. Sometimes Bucky’s pop drove Steve and Bucky over to Ebbets Field in it. He paid for good seats as long as they promised not to fight anybody, and when Steve naturally became agitated over some dumb Giants fan and wanted to fight anyway, Bucky’s ma took him back out to the car and got her thermos of soup and calmed him down with lunch. So there was nothing wrong with the Barnes car. It served its purpose. Steve liked it, said he liked it, and Bucky was proud.

But he’d still wanted to show Steve the Stutz. The Stutz was something else. It was a gift of the stock market, Bucky’s pop said, with a gleam in his eye. It was also a beautiful taupe with orange and white wheels, and the idea had been to go down to Coney Island in it. But then when Steve had come over, Bucky’s pop had rushed in without even taking off his hat and said excitedly that there’d been news from the realtor, and if they went this afternoon they might still have a chance.

They hadn’t wanted to send Steve home. Steve looked so sad sitting there on the stoop – Steve always looked sad, even when he wasn’t sad; Steve was just a little pathetic-looking naturally – and he’d brought over a bag of onions because his ma always told him to bring his hosts gifts as thanks, and these were the kinds of gifts Steve usually thought up. Bucky’s ma was pretty used to it. 

So there hadn’t been any question of not bringing Steve along, and after Bucky’s pop had run out to telegram their cousins about changing plans, his ma had sat them all in the living room in order from largest to smallest:

Bucky, Becky, Steve, Bobby, Dotty.

Steve ought to have gone before Becky but Bucky’s ma always forgot he wasn’t as little as he looked. She gave them all the old speech about how to act in front of the Buchanan cousins, because they were real New England people, and that was a different cut of people, really.

Steve had looked as skeptical about this as Bucky had privately felt. Skeptical and a little mutinous. But by the time they’d piled into both cars and driven across the canal and made it to Bay Ridge, the cousins had taken to Steve. They said Steve was by far the best behaved of all the children. Dotty, Bobby, and Becky protested this very loudly. Bucky didn’t, though he knew it was wildly untrue.

Steve was a pack of trouble. When Mr. O’Reilly at school complained about the new shifty-eyed groups living down at the Navy Yard, Steve would say things like, “That opinion’s so old you oughtta fumigate it,” and then take the heat for it, no problem, without complaining, and then do it again eight or nine times. He never paid enough attention during the pledge of allegiance. He checked the expiration dates religiously on the school milk and submitted petitions signed by himself and Pearl Levin and Jack Washpole – nurses’ children, all – asking for the Rights of The Child to be respected. And when Ray Bauer tried to pick a fight with him, Steve was always so stupid he gave in, usually in a spectacular fashion, usually because Ray would say things like, “Well, what am I supposed to do then, Rogers?” and then Steve would say things like, “See that window over there? Take a running jump. I think you can make it.” 

Steve was supposed to stir up trouble; that was just what Steve did. That was the promise of Steve. He was an irritable, horrible, skinny Navy Yard kid. That was why Bucky  _liked_  him.

But then they’d reached Bay Ridge.

Bay Ridge was Brooklyn, Bucky’s pop assured them. But it wasn’t. There were no Philippine ladies selling candy by the waterfront, no sailors, no women laughing and cracking jokes in other languages on the stoops. Even the stoops were different. The houses here were not crumbling a little, like Bucky’s house was. They were pleasant and airy and two stories each, and they all had American flags in front, and they all had cars in front.

“A nice middle class neighborhood,” noted a Buchanan cousin. “Norwegians. Hard-working people. Keep to themselves. Not a bad people.”

Bucky didn't see many Norwegians. He didn't see anyone. Children didn't seem to play in the streets of Bay Ridge. It was like someone had taken Brooklyn and erased it, and in place put in only an idea of Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Bucky’s parents wanted.

His parents loved the house. They pointed out the bedrooms for each of them, the modern kitchen, the paneled basement, the garage. Dotty seemed to love all the space in the yard. Bobby loved the wide staircase, so much better than the narrow one in their rowhouse. Becky loved everything. She said in adorable baby talk that everything was perfect, perfect perfect perfect, and so she regained first place in the hearts of the Buchanan cousins, and stuck her tongue out at Steve when they weren’t looking.

But Bucky put his foot down, and said what did they expect: that he’d want to move all the way out here?

His parents became annoyed with him. The Buchanan cousins looked appalled. And Bucky, who thought it was a dirty trick to take Steve out to some nice Bay Ridge house he could never have and flaunt it in his face, and an even dirtier trick to not tell  _him_  they were planning to move, said, “All the  _damn_ way out here.”

“James Buchanan Barnes!” said his mother.

Bucky looked to Steve for support.

Steve looked uncomfortable. He said, “You’re not giving it a chance, Buck,” like he wasn’t even on Bucky’s side.

Bucky was banished to the car while his parents spoke to the realtor. Steve trailed in after him. Bucky was furious. Where had his impossible friend gone, just when he’d needed him? And what would happen if he moved, and later on Steve got into a fight with Mr. O’Reilly or Ray Bauer, and  _Steve_  needed  _him_?

“You don’t have to stay just for me,” Steve said awkwardly. “This is a nice place. You don’t need to be near me. I’m trouble anyway.”

“But Steve,” Bucky said, fighting back tears, “I  _love_  you.”

-

“ _Steve_ ,” Bucky said, “I love you.”

Howard Stark burst into laughter. Peggy Carter did not.

“Oh, shut up,” she said.

“Well, is that what she was saying?” Bucky said.

Lorraine Clarence was beautiful, good at her job, rumored to be a knockout date, and Bucky had nothing against her. But in the grand scheme of things, he thought she didn’t stand a chance. No one did. Peggy Carter had seen Steve when he was the original Steve, not this new Steve. She’d seen Steve before they’d shoved him in a metal casket and done the impossible: thrown off his weakness, put on strength instead.

And she’d liked him. Bucky didn't have to be told that she’d liked him even when he'd been small. It was all over Steve when he talked about her. It was in the way he looked at her -- the way he asked, a little furtively, about dancing.

Steve was supposed to  _hate_  dancing.

“I can’t believe you told him,” Peggy Carter was saying now. 

Stark shrugged in response.

“You tried to shoot my best friend,” Bucky reminded her.

“I’m not proud of it!” she said.

But she didn’t look not-proud.

She looked focused. Agent Carter always looked focused. Even leaning against Stark’s worktable – an at-rest pose, a pose that would make normal people seem slouchy and tired – she looked focused. Steve’s new shield sat off to one side behind her. It wasn’t banged at all. Steve was excited over this, and naturally forgiving; normally, for a weapon like this, Stark would have to submit all kinds of reports about it, there would have to be tests, Philips’ people would want to know if he could use it in the field, and if he had the reflexes and the knowledge necessary to use vibranium in a real combat situation, and what if he was attacked out of nowhere -- would the thing hold up?

The shield would have passed into the hands of countless desk men in the meantime; it would have been examined from every angle, catalogued, possibly repurposed. The process would take more time than they had.

But everyone knew Steve had been found kissing Lorraine Clarence in an alcove, and Peggy Carter’s response had been enough of a test, really. Steve had passed the test. The shield had passed the test. Now Steve would have it as soon as Stark’s people finished the paint job.

“You know, Barnes,” Agent Carter said now, “I’m surprised you and Lorraine haven’t hit it off.”

Bucky had until now been admiring the look of her, the way she leaned against that table. Now he looked away. He didn’t like the thought of Agent Carter quietly disposing of him with Lorraine Clarence. He had for many years lived an Agent Carter-less life. But now she appeared in it and she wasn't a problem, exactly. But he couldn’t wrap his head around her; she seemed to be the emblem of the new Steve, the embodiment of every great heroic thing Steve could be and have now. Not a real person at all, Agent Carter. Just the sign that a the old person -- the old Steve -- had undergone some very significant changes. 

This was not the right way to think about a person, let alone a dame.  

At least Agent Carter seemed to know he thought about her this way. He knew she knew. It was in the cool way she looked at him. 

“Hey!” said Stark, fortunately jumping into her line of vision. But then, less fortunately, he said, “Lorraine was just reassigned. She started as a nurse. He would’ve stayed away from her, wouldn’t he? He doesn't like nurses.”

Bucky shifted uncomfortably.

“Medical looked me over,” he said quickly.

They had. He’d needed it. And he couldn’t say  _no_. But there were some tests he hadn’t wanted. He hadn’t wanted them to take blood. He hadn’t wanted anyone to test his reflexes. He couldn’t stand the thought of lying down on a table.

Agent Carter put her elbows on the table and turned her head so that she was looking around Stark. It was a strange gesture on her, a girlish gesture. Bucky bet Steve had never seen it; if he had, he would’ve never shut up about it. He would have turned to Bucky with that new aspect he had, a little wondering, a little reticent like he didn’t want to brag, and outlined it in small ways, subtle ways. Slowly, deliberately got the question out: how you showed a dame you liked that. Did dames know you liked that already -- how were you supposed to talk to them? Tell them even the small things, the small moments, meant something to you?

“Medical looked you over and questioned you until Steve made a fuss and pulled you out,” Agent Carter said. “And it was really only in the chaos of the moment that the two of you got away with that.”

“Oh, god,” said Stark, snapping his fingers. “They never took blood, did they?”

Bucky hadn’t come here to discuss this. He stood. He felt a rush of fear. His blood. They wanted his blood.

He was not, he thought, the person who had gone on Zola’s table. He was a different person. He was some patchwork of an earlier Bucky Barnes, a friend to Steve Rogers, and someone else: unhappy, tired, scared, the shadow at Steve’s shoulder. This had never been supposed to happen, and yet it had.

Suddenly, like a child, he wanted to find Steve. He hated himself for it.

He made appropriate noises about leaving, did it all with ease and dignity –  _they_  didn’t know what was going on with him. But before he could take two steps Agent Carter was calling his name and Howard Stark had stepped up to block his exit.

Stark wiped his brow – unnecessary, his brow was fine. He wasn’t sweating. He looked like he was about to go to a garden party: he was wearing a lavender tie and red suspenders and neat summery pants. He always looked strangely refreshed, alarmingly dapper. Friendly. He said, “Listen, sergeant, they’re gonna catch up with you sooner or later.”

“But we can pull them off your trail, if you want,” said Agent Carter, behind him.

Bucky turned around. Agent Carter stared at him straight, the way Steve did. She said, somewhat apologetically, “They want to know about everyone who’s going to make up this team.”

“And you’re a nurse,” said Stark, in a reassuring kind of voice.

“I was,” said Peggy Carter. “Now I’m an agent. But I was.”

“Good, we’ll play it like the shield,” said Stark, deciding the thing for Bucky. “Only this time I won’t have to get shot at.”

He manhandled Bucky back into his seat, very easily. Stunned, Bucky let him. Agent Carter bustled off, grumbling about how he  _hadn’t_  been shot at, actually. Bucky had figured it out by the time she came back. He said, “You shot at them, pretended to be angry, so-- You. You put your reputation on the line so Steve could have his shield.”

“I put my reputation on the line so we could all have Steve’s shield,” she said, unrolling a medical kit. “My reputation was in tatters anyway.”

“Not with me,” Stark told her. “Anyway, who here doesn’t want to help Steve?” He shot Bucky a grin. Then, like he was discussing a gun or a bomb or any old piece of metal and wires on his worktable, really: “Say. I never asked you, sergeant. Did you like the, uh,  _advancements_  we gave him?”

Bucky stared at him. Distantly, he felt something prick him, right at the crook of his elbow, right where he’d rolled up his cuffs. He paid it no mind. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the question for a moment, and when he did he only felt a kind of hollow anger.

The silence was apparently more than enough answer for Stark. He made a face and said, “Ah. Well.” Then, like he was quoting something: “The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements every time he meets me. The rest all go on with the old measurements and expect me to fit them.”

And Agent Carter said, very naturally, in response, “Well, every meeting with someone is just a sitting unwillingly given for a portrait. A portrait that, probably, when you and he die, will still be unfinished. And, even though it’s an absorbing pursuit, the painters will end up pessimists.”

“That’s good,” said Stark.

“Thank you. It’s not mine,” said Agent Carter.

And then there was another prick, and when Bucky looked up again, she had his blood.

“Congratulations, sergeant,” Agent Carter said. “We have a sample to give them. We’ll pretend we did everything else, too, and say you passed your SSR physical.”

“I’m not pessimistic,” was all Bucky told her. Told himself.

“Excuse me?” said Agent Carter.

“You said I’d end up a—a pessimist,” Bucky said furiously. “I’m not—“

He wasn’t.

“—I love Steve. Even this Steve—“

“I could just as easily have been talking about him making your portrait,” Agent Carter noted evenly. “We don’t know if  _you’ve_  changed, Sergeant Barnes.”

But he hadn’t. Stark passed him the results a short while later.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said, flashing even white teeth.

But Bucky thought about the shield, and how he’d given them his blood, and Lorraine Clarence, who he’d struck up conversation with the other day.

“Heard you were a nurse?” he’d told her.

“What?” she’d said, confused. “No. Who told you that?”

But now Howard Stark, the liar, the man who made the impossible possible, said again, “Nothing at all to worry about. You’re the same old you.”

He didn’t feel like the same old him. He felt like only pieces of him had made it out, and like they were warring with new pieces, ugly pieces, jealous ones. He couldn’t say this to Howard Stark. He didn’t want to. He thought about what it might mean for the SSR, if they had a secret weapon, and then in the shadow of that secret weapon, an even more secret one. Layers of secrecy to pull back. Two brand new weapons to test.

Paranoia. He was paranoid. That was all.

Stark seemed to sense that Bucky wasn’t doing so well.

“Music cheers me up,” Stark said easily, and walked away.

-

“Steve,  _pal_ ,” Bucky said. “I love you.”

But Steve only stood with his arms crossed in the middle of the empty apartment, and gave Bucky a look that said:  _you’re gonna have to do better than that_.

Fair enough. He knew Bucky loved him. He’d heard it enough times.

It was an excellent apartment in an excellent house. The Bay Ridge beautiful two-stories with their paneled basements were all subdivided now. Few families could afford a whole house. But now that Bucky was a little older, a little wiser, he could see the value in even one level of these houses. They were spacious. The windows weren’t narrow. The stairs weren’t steep. The neighborhood was by the water, like Steve’s was, but this was healthy water, safe water, middle class water, sometimes even with views. Views that weren’t alleys or the back of the Horn & Hardart automat. They were going to build a whole new hospital complex here soon. The light that came in from the front windows was good. It wasn’t too far from the subway.

“Bay Ridge,” Steve said, unimpressed. “With the Norwegians.”

“You hate the Norwegians now?” Bucky said.

“I don’t hate the Norwegians,” said Steve. “I just thought you didn’t like Bay Ridge.”

“Bay Ridge is great,” said Bucky. “They have a golf club.”

“A  _golf club_.”

Alright, so Bucky didn’t play golf. He didn’t have the first idea of what golf entailed, really; he only thought maybe some of his mother’s family played it, and it would be easy enough to learn. He didn’t like to think of himself as barred from golf, didn’t see any point in being a backwards kind of snob about golf – this was the United States of America, and it might be a failing country right now, a pessimistic country, but he would play golf if he damn well felt like it. He brought in a decent enough salary. He wore a suit to work at his cousin’s importing business. He was golf material. He’d play golf.

“Look,” he said, after a minute, “Just give Bay Ridge a chance.” He looked out of the window, stared at the handsome nearly-identical houses, the wide streets, the American flags, the carefully-maintained cars, most of them at least ten years old. “I like it here, Steve. And I need somebody to help me out with it. Ma and Pop want Becky and Herb to move in with them; it’s easier if I move out.”

“All the way out here?” Steve said. He walked to the window and squinted, took in the wholesome view. One of his eyes was swollen. He had friends who were writing some newspaper piece on Hitler’s supporters in the city, so he’d snuck into a meeting of the America First committee. He had the look for it; he was pale, and blue-eyed, and normal-seeming if you didn’t know him; he might have been one of Father Coughlin’s Irish. Only of course he wasn’t; he was Steve, and so he ended up with a concussion and two broken fingers and that eye.

Bucky didn’t think much of Steve's other friends.

Steve apparently didn’t think much of the view. He said, without preamble, “You hate Jersey.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Bucky said, annoyed.

“You hate Jersey,” Steve said. “You move out here, you might as well move out to Jersey.”

“Just because I don’t wanna live so close to the Navy Yard—“ Bucky began.

Steve threw up his hands. His whole face took on the frank contrariness that was uniquely, quintessentially Steve. He said, “Bucky—“

“—maybe I want to live in a place that’s, say, not full of tramps and bums and—“

“—Bucky, you  _love_  the Navy Yard.”

Bucky looked away again. “Don’t tell me what I love, Steve,” he said.

“Fine,” Steve said. “I’ll be waiting outside. I can’t afford half the rent on a place in Bay Ridge.”

This was untrue, because Bucky had calculated it. This place was well within their range, even if Steve didn’t get work for a month or two. It was going cheap. And Bucky could cover the full rent, anyway.

“Steve—“ he tried.

“Medicine,” Steve said, holding up a finger as he walked away. Then another, “My share of the food, subway fare, six or seven  _coats_  for every winter where I  _freeze_  because I’m waiting for the  _two train_.”

He’d no sooner vanished through the front door than the woman from the realty office came in through the back. She said lightly, “Is everything alright? It’s not usually the bachelors that fight this much. Sometimes with families you’ll get a husband who—”

“Don’t worry,” Bucky said. “He’s dramatic enough, you’d think he was my wife.”

But then he realized how rude this was, and thanked her, and took a copy of the listing and told her they needed to look the neighborhood over, get a better feel for it. As soon as he stepped outside, though, even he could feel that the place wasn’t really right. Steve looked remarkably out of place here. He was sitting on the curb, sketching, and in his old hat and too-big pants and ugly green shirt with the stained collar, he was clearly no resident of Bay Ridge.

But Bay Ridge would be good for him. It was quiet here. There were nice parks. And it was just upscale enough that Bucky could argue that he needed Steve. He’d tried enough times, tried to get Steve to move in with the family, tried to get Steve to consider places on Smith Street or Court. But Steve always said thanks, but no thanks, in the end.

Thanks, Buck, I can get by on my own.

Thanks.

Thanks, and no.

Bucky sat down next to him. Steve was sketching the old stretch of restaurants down by the Yard, where he used to work. Bucky said, “You know, lots of people would kill to move in here.”

Steve looked at him a little disbelievingly. He said, “Not me.”

“Really,” Bucky said.

“Nope,” said Steve. “Not me.”

“This is what everybody dreams about—”

Steve tapped the listing with one finger, right where it asked for Christians, and said, “They’re not gonna let some people in through the door. Some dream.” He shrugged one narrow shoulder. “I like it where I am, Buck. I don’t wanna make a change. Not right now. When I do want it, I’ll do it. But not because you feel sorry for me.”

He went back to sketching. Bucky stared down at him. Steve’s hands were skinny but steady. He was stooped over his sketchbook, small, bony, but his face was set and determined.

When Bucky thought about what _he_ wanted, it was Steve. Horrible, swollen-eyed Steve, who was as insufferable about Jersey as Bucky was, and twice as insufferable about golf.

But he was beginning to see that it was impossible. Even if they did come here to Bay Ridge, the two of them, what would happen? Steve didn't dream about a nice apartment with a paneled basement, an American flag, a carefully-maintained car, and Bucky there next to him. Steve dreamed about getting by on his own.

And so he didn’t hear how when Bucky said, “I love you,” he was saying, really: “I don’t want to get by without you.”

-

The car continued along the FDR drive. On Steve’s side, they passed Roosevelt Island. They saw at the end the wreck of an old building, just the bones of it, really, lying abandoned, while further along skyscrapers dotted the space between Manhattan and Queens.

Bucky remembered remembering.

“Steve, I love you,” he’d said. To many Steves. Not to this man, maybe, but to the jumble of different Steves that existed inside him. The same Steve. But also all the different measurements of Steve, the different sizes he’d occupied. To every one, he’d said the same thing.

“Do you remember? The end of the line?” Steve had said, when Bucky had asked to come in, to see the doctors, to stop running.

But of course he hadn’t. He didn’t know anything about the end of the line, except that once there had been a two train and it had terminated in Bay Ridge. But that, he thought, was not a thing he’d ever said. It was just a fact. And he’d never made it to Bay Ridge. There was no end of his line yet. There was only now.

Now, Steve said, almost a little recklessly, “Do you want to know what it means? What you said?”

And he produced a sketchbook, and in were the various Buckys, the old measurements of him.

No. Not quite.

Bucky took them and looked them over. These were his portraits – or partial portraits, anyway. They were the layers of him that had existed before he occupied this body, spoke with this voice, thought with this brain. Some of them had already been rubbed out completely – for example, he couldn’t conceive of ever having been this child. That was a lost person. And the man who looked uneasy sitting near the munitions; that was not him, either.

Bucky remembered waiting for Steve to come get him, after all these months, sitting near the Manhattan Bridge and trying out, “Steve, pal, I love you,” to see if he could make this a worthy lie, a dream Steve could believe in. But it was impossible. He was different now, and there were parts in him that responded to Steve, and new ones that didn’t.

The Manhattan Bridge had said nothing in response. And he’d sat there, in a park underneath it, and behind him there’d been a single row of old dockside warehouses, and everywhere else nothing but skyscrapers with thousands of windows, clean and fast ferryboats, laughing children on carousels, upscale restaurants, beautiful girls sitting by the water. This was the old neighborhood. No. The new neighborhood. The old neighborhood had been shabby, poor, dangerous, cheap. Now it had swapped out its body for a new one. The new one was better.

When you erased the old one, Bucky thought, was it right to mourn? Was it fair?

Bucky looked at Steve now. But Steve’s expression didn’t give anything away. The old Steve, now he would have been anxious, or upset, or maybe just calmly contrary. This Steve was calm, blank, careful. This Steve was new and old at the same time.

“You sad about it?” Bucky said. “I’m not this one—“ He flipped through the sketchbook, picking out the old abandoned bodies, “—or that one, or this one. I’m never gonna be this one. Looking for them—there’s no point. It’s impossible.”

“I wasn’t looking for them,” Steve said, exhaling. “I—I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

He stopped, craned his head, made a face like he was admitting something. That was familiar; Bucky knew that. Steve said, “I was looking for somebody who…”

“Who?” Bucky prompted.

They were stuck in traffic now. To once side of them there were ugly brown buildings, hideous modern takes on the tenement: the new trying on the old, that was all.

“Somebody who’d be looking for me,” Steve said. “That’s all.”

Bucky looked back at the sketchbook. He understood. The I love yous here were not for him. They were for old bodies, for the pieces of himself he could never fully get back to, even if some of them still flickered faintly inside him. But then every I love you was like that. It was impossible to deliver an eternal I love you. People changed too fast. When you looked away and looked back, there they were, measured out a little differently.

So what mattered wasn’t the words, or when you said them. But that you kept saying them. He’d kept saying it. Over and over and over. For every new Steve he’d come across.

Silence descended as they made their way out of the Manhattan, up through the Bronx, past the stadium.  _Enemy territory_ , said one of the oldest pieces of him, very distantly. Next to him, Steve made a sound like a suppressed laugh. A laugh at nothing, at a private joke; maybe an old piece of him was saying the same thing.

A little while later they got out near a large house.

Steve said, “You wanna go in, go ahead. You don’t want them to do anything to you, you say the word. I—I’ll be here for you. Whatever you want—“

Steve had never said I love you. It wasn't his style to say it in those words.

“—I’m here. You want to leave and not look back? Fine. I—“

“Don’t you want me to get better?” Bucky offered. He remembered looking at Steve, or at a Steve like this Steve. And he remembered wanting him gone. Restored to his former self. He’d liked some Steves better, hadn’t he? And Steve must prefer those vibrant portrait-Buckys. He had so many of them. This Bucky wasn't them; he was only an ugly mix of old and new that Steve had to get to know all over again.

“I don’t want you to—” Steve stopped, looking downright mulish, “—I don’t want better. I want whatever’s good for you. Whatever you think you need. Just because—just because people say you don’t know what that is…  _I_ don’t know what that is. So I can’t decide for you.” 

Steve had never said it as much.  _I love you_.None of that from Steve. It had always been Bucky saying it, Bucky saying it as he pinched himself, and loved Steve, and yet resented loving this impossibility, this transient person, the ever-changing measurements of Steve, the things he could never get a handle on.  _  
_

"I can't decide for you," Steve repeated now, instead of saying _I love you_. 

Maybe Steve's love was worth a lot more than Bucky's. Bucky was getting the better end of the deal here.

“Alright,” he said simply. And he didn’t say anything after that, just took Steve’s hand and let Steve watch, unafraid, as he clasped it between his hands, so that Steve could feel the old one and the new one. And then, very oddly, he did a thing he’d never done before in his life, which was to kiss it. Steve’s hand.

That was it. That was all. He’d just wanted to do it. Not say the words, which now seemed superfluous. But to show them.

Steve inhaled very sharply, thrown off balance. That was new for him. Bucky liked it.

-

Steve went back in the cab, which they'd taken only because cabs in New York became a way of hiding in plain sight. The agent also seemed to enjoy being a cabbie; he swore a lot, and violated basic traffic laws. Steve let him get to it. The touchscreen came on. It played the same old song.

“It’s impossible. That’s why they call it the American Dream: because you have to be asleep to believe in it!” said the comedian.

And this was true. It had been true for a long time, for forever. This was what made it funny. But forever didn’t count for anything. Steve had been small, weak, not wanted by his country – for forever. But then they’d done the impossible: stuck him in a metal casket and rebuilt parts of him. And forever had changed. He'd awoken to a new forever.

He had the agent drop him off near the bridge, near where he’d picked Bucky up, where his motorcycle was. He walked past the park down a cobbled street. A still-cobbled street. He could see old trolley tracks here, like if he peeled off all the buildings he might find old Brooklyn again. But he didn’t want to.

When he came home he sat at the table and looked over his sketches, and saw that Bucky had written, carefully, near the bottom of one, “Unfinished.” Bucky’s handwriting looked completely different now. Steve traced it out with a finger, getting used to it. He went over the sketchbook and wrote out himself, under every single one, “Unfinished,” or “Work in progress,” to show he agreed. Work always in progress. People did not stay the same. Not even the normal ones, who weren’t like him and Bucky, who weren’t weapons.

And then he sketched out this new Bucky. And when he was done he looked up and there he was, sitting across from him patiently, looking calmly at his hands. He’d come in so quietly Steve hadn’t heard him. The old Bucky – no, the  _first_  Bucky, the original – had stomped everywhere, made as much noise as possible. But the succession of Buckys that had come after had become quieter and quieter, and now they had the Soldier, and he appeared where he wanted to, mostly, and came in on his own terms.

“That old man said he might be able to reset me,” Bucky said. “I don’t want that.”

“Okay,” Steve said.

It would be harder for Bucky to get better, to learn to live normally, without that reset. It might be completely unachievable. He was choosing to stay in the confines of this new person, this new body and mind, and it wasn’t the easy, loving, friendly mind that had come before. It was scarred, and dangerous, and unfamiliar.

“You can stay here if you want,” Steve offered, smiling a little. “Shine my shoes, and—“

“I’ll stay, but I’m not shining your goddamn shoes,” Bucky said, indignant.

This Bucky was going to be impossible to live with.

They’d work it out. 

**Author's Note:**

> My historical expertise really ends at the army stuff. This SSR doesn’t work according to historical principles. I expect it works according to whatever lets me write in Howard and Peggy behaving like a proto-SHIELD. Howard misquotes George Bernard Shaw. Peggy misquotes Hope Mirlees. The comedian in question is George Carlin, who is dead, but in this world he isn’t, maybe, I don’t know. Whatever you want. 
> 
> Kid!Steve’s snarky comebacks are from Footlight Parade. The train that goes to Bay Ridge used to be the BMT 2, but now it is the R.


End file.
